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Page 17
When the lodger had gone out he had not taken his bag with him, of
that Mrs. Bunting was positive. And yet, though she searched high
and low for it, she could not find the place where Mr. Sleuth kept
it. And at last, had it not been that she was a very clear-headed
woman, with a good memory, she would have been disposed to think
that the bag had never existed, save in her imagination.
But no, she could not tell herself that! She remembered exactly
how it had looked when Mr. Sleuth had first stood, a strange,
queer-looking figure of a man, on her doorstep.
She further remembered how he had put the bag down on the floor of
the top front room, and then, forgetting what he had done, how he
had asked her eagerly, in a tone of angry fear, where the bag was
--only to find it safely lodged at his feet!
As time went on Mrs. Bunting thought a great deal about that bag,
for, strange and amazing fact, she never saw Mr. Sleuth's bag again.
But, of course, she soon formed a theory as to its whereabouts.
The brown leather bag which had formed Mr. Sleuth's only luggage
the afternoon of his arrival was almost certainly locked up in the
lower part of the drawing-room chiffonnier. Mr. Sleuth evidently
always carried the key of the little corner cupboard about his
person; Mrs. Bunting had also had a good hunt for that key, but,
as was the case with the bag, the key disappeared, and she never
saw either the one or the other again.
CHAPTER V
How quietly, how uneventfully, how pleasantly, sped the next few
days. Already life was settling down into a groove. Waiting on
Mr. Sleuth was just what Mrs. Bunting could manage to do easily,
and without tiring herself.
It had at once become clear that the lodger preferred to be waited
on only by one person, and that person his landlady. He gave her
very little trouble. Indeed, it did her good having to wait on the
lodger; it even did her good that he was not like other gentlemen;
for the fact occupied her mind, and in a way it amused her. The
more so that whatever his oddities Mr. Sleuth had none of those
tiresome, disagreeable ways with which landladies are only too
familiar, and which seem peculiar only to those human beings who
also happen to be lodgers. To take but one point: Mr. Sleuth did
not ask to be called unduly early. Bunting and his Ellen had fallen
into the way of lying rather late in the morning, and it was a great
comfort not to have to turn out to make the lodger a cup of tea at
seven, or even half-past seven. Mr. Sleuth seldom required anything
before eleven.
But odd he certainly was.
The second evening he had been with them Mr. Sleuth had brought in
a book of which the queer name was Cruden's Concordance. That and
the Bible--Mrs. Bunting had soon discovered that there was a
relation between the two books--seemed to be the lodger's only
reading. He spent hours each day, generally after he had eaten
the breakfast which also served for luncheon, poring over the Old
Testament and over that strange kind of index to the Book.
As for the delicate and yet the all-important question of money,
Mr. Sleuth was everything--everything that the most exacting
landlady could have wished. Never had there been a more confiding
or trusting gentleman. On the very first day he had been with them
he had allowed his money--the considerable sum of one hundred and
eighty-four sovereigns--to lie about wrapped up in little pieces
of rather dirty newspaper on his dressing-table. That had quite
upset Mrs. Bunting. She had allowed herself respectfully to point
out to him that what he was doing was foolish, indeed wrong. But
as only answer he had laughed, and she had been startled when the
loud, unusual and discordant sound had issued from his thin lips.
"I know those I can trust," he had answered, stuttering rather, as
was his way when moved. "And--and I assure you, Mrs. Bunting, that
I hardly have to speak to a human being--especially to a woman"
(and he had drawn in his breath with a hissing sound) "before I
know exactly what manner of person is before me."
It hadn't taken the landlady very long to find out that her lodger
had a queer kind of fear and dislike of women. When she was doing
the staircase and landings she would often hear Mr. Sleuth reading
aloud to himself passages in the Bible that were very uncomplimentary
to her sex. But Mrs. Bunting had no very great opinion of her sister
woman, so that didn't put her out. Besides, where one's lodger is
concerned, a dislike of women is better than--well, than the other
thing.
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